and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Some Arseburger went off on Blogshares today - talking about how it could inject some intelligent thought into one's linking activities - how it could improve the overall intellectuality of the 'sphere. He even said I would get a "slow burning rationalization"(sic) of how valuable and powerful linking really is. "Genuine increased (intellectual) value of links." would result, he said. And maybe he is right. It's probably worth it to instill a little bit of accountability and thought into the whole endeavor but - really - is blogging about linking? Blinking! There, I invented a new word. Great to describe the art of a blog with little to no content but a huge fucking blogroll.

To each there own, I say, but notice I don't have a blogroll. I do sort of, but it's not here. Blogspot is ass slow (I shouldn't complain, it is free) so I don't want to be using this site as my personal jumping off point on the web - my mini portal as it were. I can just stick to browser favorites and email and take it from there. Really, in a perfect world, Google would be the "perfect" jumping off point - one box, one button, the whole world - but the world ain't perfect, is it?

Come to think of it, that's a great slogan for Google. Hey Google - listen up! One Box, One Button, The Whole World... or something like that

A co-worker of mine has a local HTML file that he tweaks to his liking. All his favourites and links and comics and anything he might find himself needing. It's simple text, loads quick, and it's set in his browser as the start page.. But it's static. It doesn't change. There are no headlines or spotlights of interest. So it, also, isn't perfect.

What is perfect? It certainly ain't MSN.com. Or any other portal, for that matter. The clash between the bottom line and the top experience causes some serious conflict of interest. What's interesting, though, is that we've seen a proliferation of media content providers and services (think headlines delivered to your cell phone, Tivo, Satellite radio) but only Tivo has come up with a truly compelling feature - the ability to let the machine record what you might like in it's off time. I think this is pretty amazing. Not that it's an amazing feat, but because it's so simple a concept yet has never been done before. Editing your news headline options on my.yahoo.com doesn't quite cut the mustard - but Tivo. Wow.

Now I can't really speak for it's effectiveness - I've never used a Tivo - but I can ask why we don't have that anywhere else. Why is all the media content delivered to me - even in the age of the web - in the same format as it's been delivered for eons? You could argue that the web has done a lot for liberating the masses to choose among a much wider array of news sources, and that would be true, but the end result is just a really _big_ "media outlet" (the www) delivering media from all the little guys (cnn, cbc, cnn, bbc, yahoo, etc). The delivery is the same! In this day and age of ridiculus computing power - so much so that SETI finds it worth it's time to try to suck down your extra horsepower - we don't really have our computers working for us on their downtime. They sit there, dormant, and unless you're an ubergeek compiling nightly builds of the BSD kernel your computer is really a waste of resource. Why isn't my computer out there, on the web, doing my dirty work for me while I sleep? Why isn't it paying my bills and setting up appointments and finding all the interesting tidbits of news for me? Why isn't my computer smart enough to collect interesting blog entries as they appear in the ether - like plucking ripe fruit from the vine? Why isn't my computer applying complex algorithms to web page text and links in order to deliver me the most appropriate results for "Honda front oil balancer shaft seal recall" when I wake up in the morning?

But maybe blogshares is it? Maybe the micro-publication revolution will change the way we think and feel about the information in our society. We will revert to a storytelling nature. We'll all sit around the campfire in the global village. Unorthodox projects like blogtree and craigslist and blogshares will direct us in our search for content. With the advent of scripting systems and more processor power my grandmother will be developing powerfilters to cull the most relevant pegonia references into a melting pot of pegonia goodness - Grandma's Guide to Everything Pegonia - If It Ain't Pretty, It Ain't A Pegonia - a veritable feast of....

links.

How far can you go before your micro publication becomes a macrolist of content links and a nanospot of original content? How much patience do people have to click through link after link to get to that morsel of real information?

It would be interesting to see blogs measured not only by link power but content power. It would be interesting to measure CNN.com not by blabber power but fact power. It would be interesting, after all, to read content.